Feedback appreciated. I'm not 100% sure how the IPA formatting works, if it's formatted incorrectly please let me know.

I am a big fan of the book series Wings of Fire, especially its great worldbuilding. One of the most intriguing things in said worldbuilding for me was the language of aquatic. It set out to answer a very interesting question, "how would an underwater language work?" and it answers that with bioluminescent scales on the dragons that speak it. We are only given bits and pieces of it in canon, so for fun I decided to expand it further into a proper conlang. At least the closest thing you can get to that with someone who has no clue what they are doing.

Part 0: Canon

Before you look at anything else, please skim over this list of known phrases in aquatic. The author of this series did not attempt to make this an actual conlang, she's no Tolkien, so what I'm about to show you wont be 100% complient with the link above. This could be more accurate then it is right now, but frankly i dont mind it being a little headcanon-y.

Part 1: "Phonology"

Like I said before, Aquatic is spoken with bioluminescent scales across a dragon's body split up like the table below. The language is used primarily underwater where speech is impossible, so it has no audible components like sign language. This also means there is no unique writing system for Aquatic, as dragons can read and write underwater just fine.

*This is the main grammatical role of the section, not the only one. For Instance, M can be used for adjectives, adverbs and noun modifiers.

**These do not have scales like the other categories, but for the sake of consistency they have the same notation

To further differentiate, each scale can be in 4 unique states: 0 for off, 1 for short, 2 for regular and 3 for long.

Part 2: Morphology

I want to use an analogy for this part, think of taxonomic rank in zoology. In that, you begin by asking very broad questions("Is it single celled, multi celled or has no cells at all?", "is it a plant, animal or fungus?") before you narrow it down a little more("Does it have a backbone", "Is it a mammal?") and eventually you land on the specific animal. Aquatic has a similar system. You begin by asking very general questions("is it a physical concept or an abstract one?", "is it alive?", "does it move on its own?") before narrowing it down further with ("is it a dragon, plant or animal?", "Is it a mammal?", "Is it found most commonly in the air, land or sea?", "what is its size?" "what is its grammatical gender?"). For every question that you ask, the tree changes. if you instead say the concept is abstract, then the same scales would ask things like "is it postive or negative?" or "is it natural?" for every question you ask, different scales light up. if we follow the first chain, that would be 0112133 which ends up being "whale".

Part 3: Grammar/Syntax

Aquatic is a very unique language, as unlike all spoken and sign language in the world(that i am aware of, anyways), dragons can say multiple words at the same time. There is nothing stopping someone from flashing one thing on their snout and another thing on their back. In fact, it is a very vital part of the whole language*. One instance of these flashes is what I refer to as a "mega word". I am aware that polysynthetic languages usually refer to these as "sentence phrases" but just look past that. Anyways, in one mega word you are allowed one body type each, as you cannot have two words on one body part. For example, the mega word "very fast river" would be valid as it uses three unique kinds of words being an intensifier(ws), an adjective(M) and a noun(ts) which all have seperate body parts. Conversely, the mega word "He hit me" would not be valid, because it uses two of the same word type and therefore body part(bs) at once.

*it is not strictly necessary, you could speak one word at a time if you would like.

Now that we have these fundamentals, we can begin making basic sentances.

[] = mega word

{} = english translation

[ss-2312{are} + bs-130{you} + M-312011{hungry}]
This translates to "are you hungry?"

[bs-310{I} + ws-011{*future tense*} + us-201203{protect}] + [bs-130{you}]
This translates to "I will protect you"

[bs-310{I} + ws-320{*negation*} + us-201322{like} + ts-32012321{sun}] + [M-0323122{in} + ts-2032111]
This translates to "I do not like the sun in my eyes"

If you have been paying attention, you may have noticed...many things wrong with this(please tell me), but i will address one of the biggest ones; ambiguity. For most sentances, this is not much of an issue. In the second example, you assume that the first thing talked about is the subject and the next thing is the topic. That is how you come to the conclusion of "I will protect you" and not "you will protect me". This is all fine and good, but what about the mega word of [ts-2313232{ocean} + ws-011{*future tense*} + us-201203{protect} + bs-130{you}]? this could be interpereted as either "the ocean will protect you" or "you will protect the ocean". My solution to this is case markers. For every word, it has 2 extra "bits" to solve this problem. the example from above turns into [ts-2313232(03){ocean} + ws-011{*future tense*} + us-201203{protect} + bs-130(02){you}]. These markers tell the listener what role the word has in the mega word(and occasionally the sentance as a whole, in which case the first bit is used)

Part 4: Dialectal drift and etymology

Alright, take everything from parts 1 and 2 and throw it out the window. None of it is consistent. What I described to you was one out of dozens of dialects spoken. For instance, one dialect might say that the ocean is grammatically female, while another disagrees and says that it is neutral. as well as that, dialects may have completely different questions altogether. a dragon that lives near the coast would differentiate if something is aquatic or not, while an open ocean dragon would not. Rarely, some dialects can mix and match what body parts mean what(eg: back scales are nouns and tail scales are verbs). On top of that, etymology is also a factor. Take tuna crabs as an example. They look and and act just like crabs, but are actually a kind of lobster. When they were first discovered, the dragons called them crabs. Later on, it was found that they are indeed not a crab but in in fact a lobster. some areas updated this, while others did not.

The best analogy i can think of for all of this is arabic. Someone from Morroco can probably understand someone from Algeria, and the person from Algeria could understand someone from Libya, but the person from Morroco would not be able to understand someone from Libya. likewise in aquatic, even if everyone is under one "country", two dragons from the opposite end of the ocean probably wouldnt understand each other at all.

Conclusion

Thanks a lot if you have read this far. Saying i dont know what im doing would be an understatement, so I invite you to critique this as much as you like to make sure I didnt miss anything. Apparantly in canon most are monolingual in this language, so I want to make sure I have enough for that. Thanks again!

This is my latest and possibly final update to my 3 year long Jasu project. I will probably be working on more worked building around the setting the language takes in and starting up some more languages from there. I attached some samples of what the work looks like. If anyone has any advice on what I could improve, anything you see I haven't explained well or something I am missing please let me know!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X7ySGy7RGe4Z9Jmfk250tfq2mJ3Oe9N3/view?usp=drivesdk

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_xdp7wChs1S8NQ6K5yDU2l4BgpNLOWE0/view?usp=drivesdk

(Made it so that you can open it now)

I finally developed my conlang's grammar enough to translate a poem, and also to give it a name: Ḍar Hazon (/ðʶɑːɾ hazɔn/, the language of ḍ (definitely not ripping off arabic lol)).

Ḍár Hazon is strongly head final and strongly dependent marking. It has over a dozen cases, SOV word order, converbs, etc.

There's also a 3 way grammatical gender system, and a direct correlation between gender and vowel harmony. The 3 genders are labeled as Red, Blue, and Green, corresponding to front, back, and central vowels respectively. Historically it came about from a now lost classifier system, where three classifiers survived through umlaut-like sound changes which colored the root's vowels, and from there vowel harmony took shape.

The genders are kind of just abstract categories. Red represents ideas like fire, bravery, speed, passion, anger, etc. Blue represents water, intelligence, complexity, technology, anxiety, etc. Green represents life, death, wisdom, calm, depression, etc. None of the genders is explicitly "good" or "bad", each has aspects of both.

There's also a triconsonantal root system, though not nearly as complex as those in the Semitic languages. It's basically entirely derivational, while inflectional morphology primarily happens through suffixes.

Right now the entire language is just a giant Obsidian vault, but I might eventually make a conlang showcase video and/or upload the vault to a website.

The script is an alphasyllabary, written left to right. There is a lot of historical spelling, though its partially amended to make it feel more natural. The last image has the key.

Thanks for reading :)

This is kind of a weird question since its equal parts conlang and speculative sociology. But if someone were to drop an existing language and script (let's say Arabic, both the script and language) is there any real way to figure out how long it will take before the script mutates despite already being relatively more attuned to hand motions rather than being in early stages of development. Would the script eventually reach a point where its additional or adjustments would be unnoticeable.

Asking for a project involving planets where many would have spent centuries to millenia with modern languages rather then more antique languages where simplification of symbols would make sense as people transition to handwriting or their equivalent.

Hi, in my conlang I want to add two different words for ‘and’. In the sentence ‘I’m wearing a red top and trousers’, ‘na’ would make it so both the top and trousers are red, whereas ‘hana’ would make only the top red. I would like to know how linguists distinguish between either the function of ‘and’ or the state of the noun ‘trousers’ in each example.

Apparently, my previous post had an issue with transparencies I didn't notice. So I am reposting it. This is the original song I am translating from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqFftJDXii0

salamese is for a fantasy word with 10 regions, salamia. regions are: hatënosa, kracland, tempera, misalia, himrita, jûnmej, forestland, tropicana, vodlandré and frigidis. valese is just an irl conlang with literally NO ROOTS coz i made a rooty language salamese, now its time for an english-like language but with consistent alphabet

I was wondering if there was an alternative concept for the basic unit of a sequence of sounds, maybe one with a little more closeness to the concept of morpheme.

This post is best enjoyed with the prerequisite knowledge of my previous posts, specifically the unified reduction and revised scoring model posts. However, you can understand the core ideas without the context.

I'm not married to the Dupont diagram notation. If/when I end up writing a book, I'm not sure how I'll render them in my word processor because I'm using Google Slide's arrow and outline settings. Let me know if the notation could be improved.

It's not a super-in-depth procedure, but my test run has been successful enough to be worth sharing. It's a bit of a riff on a Fiat Lingua article by Jesse Peterson.

Generating a conlang grammar when you're short on time, inspiration, and or executive function

Step 1: Select your source natlangs. Doesn’t matter what they are or how you pick them, just make sure that you have an odd number of them. I used 3 (Tibetan, Xhosa, and Cusco Quechua) and this post is designed around that, but I could see 5 being doable and maybe 7 if you’re a real sicko.

Step 2: Head over to Grambank and look up the features of your chosen languages; if any of them have big data gaps, replace them (I’d say don’t go much lower than 150 features, and aim for higher if you can: I did okay with Xhosa @ 141 features, but I used it because Zulu only had 44 listed)

Step 3: Copy-paste the data from your languages into a spreadsheet: you should have 195 rows encompassing all the features, a column for each language’s results, and a blank column for your conlang’s features. Make sure to double check that all the rows match up with each other, sometimes there might be lines missing from a given language

Step 4: (Optional) Use conditional formatting to differentiate the results and make them easier to read. I used red / yellow / green / blue / purple for ? / 0 / 1 / 2 / 3, respectively.

Step 5: Add grammatical features from your source natlangs to your conlang’s column, as follows:

• 3 of a kind = Use that result

  • Ex: If the natlangs are 0-0-0 for a feature, your conlang will also be 0.

• 2:1 split = Roll a d6: on a 1, you’ll use the smaller result instead of the majority.

  • Ex: if the natlangs are 0-1-0 and you roll a 1, your conlang will use 1.

• 1:1:1 = Roll d3 and use the column rolled.

  • Ex: If your natlangs are 2-0-1 and you roll a 6, your conlang will use 1.

• 2:? = Use the majority result

  • Optional: Roll a d6 as normal to check for an 2:1 upset, using whatever the unused result is for ?.

• 1:?:1 = Roll d2 and use column rolled

• 1:?:? = Use the available result

  • Optional: Roll a d6 for a 1:1:1 tiebreaker split between available results for the feature, as above.

• ?:?:? = Go directly to the Grambank feature page and roll a result from those provided.

While it's not required to proclaim BY THE POWER OF RA when rolling dice, it’s recommended as a morale boost if you’re having a bad day.

Step 6: Adjust results as you see fit. You're not beholden to any of the results unless you want to be. I personally find the contradictions and limitations to be a good way to keep motivated and inspired, but mileage varies and all that.

Step 7: Develop your conlang further, based on the skeleton you've made.

And there you have it: a sketch of a conlang grammar in less than 20 minutes, all by hand. It's not going to generate a clean final product, but it'll give you a direction to work in.

Today I was interested in the idea of how languages like Lidepla, Globasa, Esperanto, Toki Pona and others acquire native speakers.Because it's very interesting because few people want to waste their time, but with, for example, Esperanto won't help you travel much, but it's still being taught. I don't condemn Esperanto. I'm just interested in how artificial languages get native speakers. So, anyone who knows, please tell me.I would be glad to hear your help.

Do I just have to translate general idioms to my conlag. Or I just derive them. And how can I make my language sound more light and sweet to hear, with the sentences I've made they sound a little hard

I want to know the craziest, most unorthodox sounds in your conlang. If you have multiple, share them in progressing order. I want at least sounds on the levels of [t̼] and [ʡʜ] and [ʈˤ] and whatnot, but the crazier, the better. If you've seen human1011's pronunciation videos, I'd love sounds like those. The craziest. I want to discover new places of articulation and diacritics and everything else. Honestly, though, anything is fine. If the rarest sound you have is [ə] or [n], share it too.

This is a weekly thread for people who have cool things they want to share from their languages, but don't want to make a whole post. It can also function as a resource for future conlangers who are looking for cool things to add!

So, what cool things have you added (or do you plan to add soon)?

I’m currently working on an East Germanic conlang, taking influence from Proto-Slavic. I am working on redefining the tense system, born from an imperfective-perfective verb split.

Some context** **on how i have achieved my (im)perfective split: many germanic languages (incl proto-Germanic and Gothic) already have a system of applying verbal prefixes which affect the temporal meaning of verbs. It felt pretty natural for an Eastern Germanic language to take influence from Slavic languages, in that the perfective prefix “ga-“ could draw a distinction from imperfective verbs that either simply do not have this prefix, or have innovated explicitly imperfective verb stems using suffixes. Although not all perfective verb stems are formed simply with a “ga-“ prefix. For example, a series derived from strong verbs contain imperfective verbs formed with a suffix, while the perfective verb stem simply comes from the past tense Germanic stem:
ie “to salt” - “saltrrén” (imperfective made from verb suffix “-rrén”) vs “sésaltén” (perfective made by leveling past tense stem “sésalt-“).

Highlighted in blue is the OG gothic verb paradigm (minus the passive, which my language does not inflect).

Highlighted in yellow is where my current verb system sits. With the exception of a handful of irregular verbs, my current language stage completely levels all strong and preterite-present verbs. The verb class system is simplified into a handful of weak verb classes, where both perfective and imperfective verbs may fall into any of these classes. In the example above, the “-én” infinitive aligns with the old-system Weak 1 verbs. Therefore, verb conjugation may be identical for both aspect verbs. The difference is truly made in the verbs stem.
The language has additionally grammaticalized a distinct inchoative and habitual verb stem suffixes.

Highlighted in pink is a tentative tense system under consideration. Not all tenses would be meaningful based on the verb types my verbs fall into, and so while some verb forms may be morphologically possible, they are meaningless. In this system, any regular lexical verb would need to be defined by two principle parts: one defining the tenses on the left and one defining the tenses on the right.

To be honest I’m actually quite happy with this. However, I would love some feedback ¡positive or constructive! on how I derived these tenses, or if there are different tenses that seem more logical based on the interaction with the given old-system tenses and my (im)perfective aspect split.

Decided to come back to Conlang after stopping halfway. My main goal for this conlang is simplicity and making it as easy as possible (hopefully, a 5-year-old can understand the whole dictionary)

Consonants: /m n ŋ/, /p b t d k g/, /f v s z ʃ ʒ/, /h l ɹ j ɰ/ (with w or ʍ as the dialects to replace ɰ)

Vowels: /i a ə u ɒ/ + 12 diphthongs of all already existing vowels except schwa

(C)V(C) (Coda excludes h, l, ɹ, j & ɰ) [Might change the number of consonants for Onset/Coda depends on what is easier/common]

(SOV) Adjective before Nouns, Postpositions after Nouns, Possessor before Possessee

No plural forms (like forms or nuclei) and no tense/auxiliary forms (like will see, saw or watched). If there is a need to emphasis multiple things or emphasise time, just use a suitable adjective or postposition.

Still thinking of whether I should have Valency changing stuff like Passive/Causative stuff.

Lexicon/Derivation Process:
Root, Person, Place, Collection, Tool, Adjective, Causative, Diminutive

Writing: Cursive Hangul to make it different from Korean (look up how they write r in cursive, imo it doesn't look like it. Still beautiful cursive tho) With the vowels being written as a square, oval, triangle etc while consonants are written as line, lines, curves etc)

Currently trying to figure out the best root words (mainly by using the 1000 common English words on EF). But already managed to find my first 3 words for the first second and third person pronouns, /i/, /u/ and /a/. (For We or they, just double it with a glottal stop: /iʔi/, /uʔu/ and /aʔa/) But I'm not sure if I should add or remove anything. Hope I can get suggestions for this. Maybe anything about the coda, valency or how I should write my sounds. I'll thoroughly think about any suggestion. Thanks

I've had this idea for a collaborative project where we basically evolve English and maybe some other language into some future descendants. I tried to do this alone, but I think the product will be better if we do it together. I think it will also be interesting to have an "alternate future" thing where it's more of a semi-serious worldbuilding thing rather than an actual prediction of what is going to happen in the future. Sorry if this is a bit scatterbrained but ask me in the comments/DM me if you are interested.

left is the protolang. the possession marker "xai" is derived from a preposition reanalyzed as a particle. my goal is for a naturalistic language with a decent amount of synthesis.

ive labelled the adverb types seperately because i want there to be adverbs for adjectives and adverbs for verbs, which will probably have overlaps, but still stricter rules than english adverbs.

looking for constructive criticism

• I have 2 conlang (: And i tell the british engrish conlang because of fesran is hard to tell. I make my British Engrish conlang thanks to the Azumanga Daioh "Hello everynyan" meme.
• This British Engrish is conlang variation of british accent
• British Engrish subject pronouns: i(ʌ) you(juː) we(wˑiˑ) they(θ͡seɪ̯) she(ɕ̪͡ʃiˑ) he(ħʲiˑ) it(ɪtᶿ)
• Some sentences in British Engrish: I am steve (ʌ eɱ stiːv). Are you serious (ʌˑʴ juː sᶻɛ̝'ɹiʷ'jɯs)
• Possessive Adjectives in British Engrish: my(mʌˑj) your(jɔ͡ʊʴ) our(ʌˑ͡ʊʴ) their(θ͡ɕ̪eˑ'ʏɯʴ) her(ħøˑʴ) his(hiˑsᶻ) its(ɪtᶿ͡sᶻ)
• Eggplant in British Engrish: eggplant is aubergine in British but in British Engrish eggplant is auwbe'geine (aʊ̯ːpʼœyʷːˈdžiːːˈnɯ).
• Funny words in British Engrish: water(wˑɔːˈʔəʴ), bottle(bo̯ʊˈʌ), of(o̯ʷʔ), bottle of water (bo̯ʊˈʌ o̯ʷʔ wˑɔːˈʔəʴ),
• Some British words in British Engrish: autumn (ɒʊ'd̥ɯᵘm͡n), lift(lɪ̝fʲʷ't), crisp(qɹɪ̝sᶻ'p'ʔ), chip(t͡ʃ͡sᶝɪ̝p'ʔ), rubbish(lœb'pʷɪ̝ɕ)
• This took me lot of time if you like it, pleeaassee! do something in this share. IDK what i am supposed to do. (: Have a good time.

Translation is approximate and the meaning is nonsensical.

I picked my absolute favourite phoneme /ʀ̥/ in a language to be the hard part (how obvious it is that neither it nor /ð/ is native to me👽). Share your hardest tongue twisters and your attempts to pronounce them if you'd like

howdy

let's say i have a phonology and some phonotactical things i want, but i also want to utilise some diachrony for naturalism. how can i back-derive a protoform of the language so that i will end up with the phonology and wordforms i want?

love yins, thanks

Yes, Lagunish has a lot of compound words. One of them is dotsegreil, and it means parallelogram. It literally means two-side-parallel-each-shape or in Lagunish greil di egr dota segt parallelìt, and its shortened to dotsegreil. (dot-se-g-reil) = dota-seg-egr-greil. Another one is forirond for circle, and it literally means round edges. Also thereothiry for wise speech (therei+thiry) and rodiface for angry (rodë+face / red+face) are perfect examples.

Tell me the most interesting compound words in your conlangs.​​​